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Mumbai attacks

A brutal and detailed report on 2008’s Mumbia terror attacks:

“Reports would later surface that the gunmen, in preparation for the attack, had injected a mix of steroids, cocaine, and LSD to keep them awake and deaden their senses to the carnage they were poised to inflict…” source.

SNCF Ringtone

We (me and my fiancée) recently traveled to France. It was a fantastic vacation. One of the cool things we experienced is the high speed train, the TGV. We took it from Paris to Marseilles, and from Nice back to Paris. It’s a marvel of modern technology, fast, efficient and comfortable. We also rode the local trains in the south and the famous Metro in Paris. All of these services are run by French National Railways, the SNCF. No matter where you are, be it underground in Paris, or waiting for a train to Nice, all of the announcements on the train platforms are preceded by the official SNCF jingle. You can check it out in this here youtube video. Anyway, I liked it so much that I cut it up a bit and made it usable as a ring tone. To prevent it from being super annoying, I inserted just a bit over a second of silence. It works well. It’s available here. Please enjoy responsibly.

Baked beans

For the record, baked beans don’t work very well with ground meat. The meat needs to be in (largeish?) chunks. Better recipe forthcoming, pending some more experimentation.

AppStore Ratings

Stuff like this makes you wonder. How accurate are the ratings in the AppStore?



Clearly this is a positive review, but the reviewer only assigned one star! So the rating paradigm is not as clear or intuitive as I would have though. It’s a mystery.

Starting strength%2C starting running

As a prelude to the my actual post here’s the foreword to

Intelligence Squared

Fascinating podcast from NPR, Intelligence Squared US. A panel of experts is chosen and these experts argue for or against a certain proposition. The ones I’ve listened so far were Is Bush (43) the worst president of the last 50 years? and the ever popular Who’s to blame for the financial crisis?. This is apparently an Oxford-style debate (I haven’t found much info on the origins). The panelists get 2 minutes for opening statements. Then they field questions from other panelists and the audience. Before the debate starts, audience’s preference is polled. The audience is polled again at the end of the debate. Whichever team produces the largest sway in the opinion wins. The arguments are passionate and clearly biased, which makes it a fun listen. There’s Intelligence Squared UK, the original forum, which unfortunately doesn’t produce any freely available material. There’s also Intelligence Squared Australia which has links to past episodes on their website, but not in a convenient podcast format. Interesting show for anyone interested in current events and issues. Found via Dan Miessler.

Open Source %22process%22

I’ve read

Sales tracking in the appstore

Apple doesn’t provide a great interface for tracking your appstore sales. All you get is a plaintext file detailing your sales for the day, and month. Not bad to get the basic stats, but not great if you want to spot trends or get an overview for a certain period of time. Other people have stepped in to fill this niche.

appsales-mobile is an open source iphone app that provides a nice set of functionality right on your iphone. I’ve gotten into a routine of checking my sales every morning when I wake up. It’s quite convenient. If you have a developer license, grab the code, compile and stick it on your phone. Pretty incredible that it’s free and open
source.

ideaswam’s appviz is a standalone mac app that’s unfortunately not free. It does have a little more functionality though. It lets you downlaod reviews from all of the localized appstores (apparently, reviews aren’t global). $29.95 for a full copy, the trial is limited for a month. Pretty decent app as well. After using it for 3 weeks, I’m strongly considering purchasing it.

Vancouver%27s gangs

Fascinating history of Vancouver’s gangs in the 20th century.

Fuel economy

There’s a new vehicle in our future and I’m currently trying to decide which way to go. Small SUV (like a RAV4)? Large (RAM 1500) or medium (Tacoma) sized truck? Sensible choice like a Forester? One of the biggest factors is running costs, which primarily means fuel economy. Two useful sites are US Government’s Fuel Economy site which lists vehicle’s EPA stats (such as projected fuel economy and gas costs per year) and Fuelly which lets users report their fuel economy. Useful stats for making a final decision.

Paratroopers is out in the AppStore%21

Paratroopers is finally in the AppStore!

Get it

Paratroopers%21

Paratroopers v1 has been submitted to the AppStore! I’m incredibly excited. I’ll update soon with more info.

Paratroopers

Paratroopers is a high-energy arcade/action game for iPhone or iPod Touch. It is now available in Apple’s AppStore

Reading a font from file and making it available to Cocoa

This is another programming related post. Say you have a true type font that’s not part of the OS font set in a file. You’ve read the contents of the file into memory and now want to make it available to Cocoa. How? Turns out that ATSUI comes to the rescue:

	ATSFontContainerRef container;
    OSStatus status = ATSFontActivateFromMemory((LogicalAddress)[fontData bytes],           // buffer with font data
                                                [fontData length],          // size of font data
                                                kATSFontContextLocal,       // for use only in this application
                                                kATSFontFormatUnspecified,  // reserved
                                                NULL,                       // reserved
                                                kATSOptionFlagsDefault,     // reserved